For these reasons, over the past few months we've been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signalâ€”affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality contentâ€”while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we'd like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web.

I've been expecting such a ranking signal for quite a while as I continued coming across hacked sites during my research. It's only fair that secure sites should enjoy a bit more traffic than the other sites in the SERPs.

For now it's a lightweight signal, and a lightweight signal it will remain since it was publicly announced and SSL certificates aren't difficult to obtain.

Requiring https is another publisher tax. Supporting https browsers and bots that don't support SNI requires a dedicated IP, a decent cert costs about $7 a year and it only makes sense Google will eventually prefer publishers with EVC's, which entails significant additional cost.

Making it too expensive to webspam is a pretty effective strategy for Google.

They said that pageload was important and they have created a plugin for people to get a score for their websites.
They dismissed the score later on.

Pageload is a very very small signal in SEO. They said they will give more importance to pageload but they never did it. Google said the https ranking signal change affect less than 1% of queries so i guess it is a very small signal.

Backlinks will remain the real big signal.

I don't trust google and i am not going to buy dozens of ssl certificates for them. plus, many ssl certificates have an openssl version that is exposed to heartbleed like comodo

On top of that, there are good crawlers outside of googlebot that will not read https.
If you decide to switch to https, it means that you are going to get 301 redirections for your all site from http to https
some browsers don't read https (there are not only computers outside of here)

self signed ssl certificates on a website systematically result a warning message to each new visitors that says the certificate is not trusted. In other words, you have to buy certificates if you don't want to lose visitors after switching to https.

Requiring https is another publisher tax. Supporting https browsers and bots that don't support SNI requires a dedicated IP, a decent cert costs about $7 a year and it only makes sense Google will eventually prefer publishers with EVC's, which entails significant additional cost.

Making it too expensive to webspam is a pretty effective strategy for Google.

Click to expand...

While it will surely weed out pretty much all small-time spammers, it will not deter the serious ones.

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